Planning and Developing your Career

How to you plan your career, taking critical decisions and risks, setting goals and objectives, looking to the future, developing new skills.

It is unlikely that you will leave university and move straight into your dream job. When you leave you will be in a position where you will have to build a career out of the skills, qualities and talents that you have identified so far. And you will have to carry on learning and developing if you are to have any chance of success. Developing a strategy, and having a plan, may help you to make key decisions. If you know what your core business is, and what you are aiming to achieve in the long term, you will be able to identify the opportunities and the further training that are relevant to you, and to see what it is important to invest in or aim for in the future. This section aims to get you to consider a longer-term plan that you will incorporate into the Business Plan that you are required to produce as part of the research for this unit.

Interview Material

Our Media Professionals talk about taking not-so-good jobs in order to get good jobs, about trying to plan ahead, and about points in their careers where they have have been forced to redevelop their activities.

	4.1 Victoria Noble On how her jobs to date have allowed her to work towards her dream job.
	4.2 Vin Arthey On defining personal objectives for each job you take.
	4.3 Kate Broome On taking her first job in order to 'learn a craft'.
	4.4 Sarah Beecham and Graham Howard On how the immaturity and fluctuation of the industry makes it difficult to plan too far ahead.
	4.5 Christine Molloy On how learning on the job helped her company develop its skillbase.
	4.6 Mike Fox On how developing or changing disciplines can mean selling yourself to a whole new client base.

Think about where you would like to be in five years' time and start considering how you are going to get there.

Web Research

The following sites offer further information and career guidance. Skillset Career advice and guidance for freelances Skills for Media.com Careers and training advice for the media industries, helping you get the career you want. It provides information and a telephone advice line, CV and marketing workshops and individual advice sessions with professional media careers advisers. It is open to anyone who wants to get in or get on in the media.

	Research Project 1 - Researching your ideal role
This first Research Project will build upon your findings from Tasks 1 and 2, asking you to research in greater detail your ideal role within a specific company, programme or product. Download and print out the Research Project 1 instruction sheet.